Getting a Grip on Scottish Film

“To put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the filmmaking front, a third world country, but this is tragically misrecognised by those holding the purse strings north of the border” (p. 219). So offers Colin McArthur in one of his most trenchant and pertinent essays in this large collection of pieces gathered over many years. The article is “In Praise of a Poor Cinema,” which promptly received a couple of negative letters in Sight and Sound the month after it was published.¹ One letter, by Allan Shiach, accuses McArthur of “arthritic thinking,” being “irrelevant,” and “out of touch,” and of generating a “pseudo-debate about a sterile non-issue.” The other (by Douglas MacKinnon) tells him to “get a grip, man!” and accuses McArthur of being a dinosaur. It might seem both have a point. McArthur’s article came out in August 1993, and while Scotland didn’t have too much to shout about in the early 90s, by the end of the decade there was Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones 1995), Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996), Small Faces (Gillies McKinnon, 1995), The Acid House (Paul McGuigan, 1998), My Name is Joe (Ken Loach, 1998), Orphans (Peter Mullan, 1998) and Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999). Far from a terrible tally for a filmmaking nation McArthur believed to be Third World. If we think too of the actors coming out of this period, Scotland could have been deemed a very developed country indeed: Robert Carlyle, Peter Mullan, Ewan McGregor, Dougray Scott, Laura Fraser, Kelly MacDonald, Shirley Henderson, Douglas Henshall, Ewen Bremner and Kevin McKidd.

Yet McArthur’s broader point is an important one and hasn’t gone away, and he addresses it in numerous articles collected together here. While looking at the list above we can see more than half a dozen generally fine films, but what they also show is an inability to develop a sustainable feature film culture within Scotland, and no recognisable auteur. Michael Caton-Jones would go on to direct Basic Instinct 2, Ramsay hasn’t made a Scottish film since Morvern Cellar (2002), and Paul McGuigan has consistently worked elsewhere.  Most of the Scottish actors are in Hollywood and in TV, a sign of commercial success or cultural deracination according to taste. As McArthur says in “The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema,” published the following year, “the individual projects they [the Scottish film bodies] invest in, awarded on the basis of the ‘talent’ of the grantees, cannot be read by these institutions in terms other than as separate, autonomous films possessing no connection with each other or with Sottish history and contemporary culture” (p. 239). Who could disagree? 

What one often finds in smaller nations with precarious film industries, over abundant production opportunities, is a wave, a chance for a minnow to reveal its culture and its talent through an assertive aesthetic and a pugnacious critique of its nation. We had it with Danish cinema at the end of the 90s, Argentinean film in the 2000s, the Romanian wave during the same period, and the Berlin School also. We needn’t assume that the filmmakers in each nation were close friends or even close associates. But they were part of recognisable movements, often aligned to, influenced by, or capable of taking advantage of one or two key players that recognisably defined the style or could be deemed to represent their nation or school: Lars von Trier, Lucrecia Martel, Cristi Puiu and Christian Petzold. However, Scotland seems not to develop talents but to promote successes, leaving a filmmaker a big fish in a small pond, and a fish that often finds itself crossing the Atlantic. Bill Forsyth went Stateside to make the admirable Housekeeping (1997), but he never quite managed again the idiosyncratic style that his earlier Scottish films possessed when he returned to make Being Human (1994) and Gregory’s Two Girls (1999). Lynne Ramsay has made good films Stateside, but only two in 20 years, and has been involved in messy US production histories with films she didn’t get to make.

Perhaps part of the problem is that Scottish cinema, McArthur would claim, has never really examined itself, has never asked what stories it wants to tell and tried to develop talent that would be part of this self-examination. McArthur doesn’t see this as a failure of Scottish filmmakers, as he says in “Scotland and Cinema”: “pound for pound they are no better or worse than those of any other country” (p. 109). But they have two disadvantages: “Firstly, the dominant filmic representations of their country have been articulated elsewhere. Secondly, the indigenous Scottish institutions which exist to foster film culture have never articulated as a priority the helping of Scottish filmmakers towards the discourses which effectively counter the dominant ones” (p. 110). This might sound to some ears a bit like a re-education programme, as if McArthur wants that talent put to specific use. Yet this would be to misconstrue his claims, and these are issues he addresses throughout the book and has thus addressed over many years. McArthur’s key term is the “Scottish Discursive Unconscious,” which is also the title of one of the essays. Speaking of Alexander Mackendrick’s Maggie (1953) and Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), he says, “my argument is that when they came to make their films, both Mackendrick and Forsyth fell under the sway of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, a mechanism which, potentially at least, comes into play when anyone seeks to represent Scotland and the Scots in any sign system” (p. 279). He gives literature, film and television as examples. The problem with this mechanism is that if creative people aren’t thinking about what they are doing on an ideological level, they are likely to reproduce stale images even within the fresh ones. It isn’t that The Maggie or Local Hero are terrible films but both undeniably reproduce various tropes that in numerous essays throughout the book McArthur links to traditions generated by Walter Scott and James Macpherson, reiterated in picture postcards of Scotland and, of course, in films like Bonnie Prince Charlie (Anthony Kimmins, 1948) and Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954). 

What with a funding system that has little interest in consistently supporting its filmmaking talent, and with the filmmakers themselves inclined to duplicate images that have been generated in Scotland centuries earlier, pumped out to the world as an image of the nation, and then reintegrated into it as typical narrative tropes, is it any wonder Scottish film could be seen as in a sorry state? McArthur’s general solutions have been a mix of theory and practice, as his work absorbs structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, and muses over budgets and where money could be best spent to produce results that would combine modest profit-making and national self-realisation. When he says “getting feature production budgets below £300,000 would not only make profitability more likely for individual films, but would see many more specifically Scottish features emerging” (p. 225), this can sit alongside the absorption of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Franz Fanon and Roland Barthes as he pursues a theoretical basis for his thinking. He sees, after all, “the discursive construction of the Scot as a by-product of the European bourgeoisie’s eighteenth-and nineteenth-century construction of its own identity, one formulated by a monstrous Other that bore all the negative features the European bourgeois (homo oeconomicus) did not wish to have and/or could not bear to self-acknowledge.” McArthur then offers a table distinguishing Homo oeconomicus from Homo celticus. While the former is civilised, urban and cultured, the latter is uncivilised, rural and natural in a table of opposites that shows the presence of structuralism.

 A good example of this opposition at work would be Local Hero, especially if we add the ambitious against the shiftless that McArthur also invokes. Here we have canny locals determined to get top dollar when a Texan oil firm wants to build a refinery next to a beautiful, quiet small village with a stunning coastline. The opening shots show us a Houston freeway teeming with traffic before cutting to a short film announcing the company’s plans, and then showing us the office spaces. Here we have hushed lifts, a proliferation of glass and diegetic muzak. All the while we hear of deals being done around the world, with central character MacIntyre expecting a colleague to cover his other territories for a while. “Will you look after Africa for me” he says on the phone as we realise he is talking to the workmate across the large office space. The film plays up the broadest of contrasts with Houston as modern as the film can make it and Scotland a mainly barren wasteland. As MacIntyre passes through a remote glen with his guide, Forsyth makes it very remote indeed — no other car in sight and even a bit of Scotch mist.

There is perhaps more irony and critique than McArthur would allow; when MacIntyre and his colleague get out of the car in the glen they hear a high-speed jet flying overhead, acoustically countering the tired trope of a primitive Scotland with a modern one musing over what the heck these aeroplanes are doing invading the rural quiet. But even if Forsyth peppers his films with ironies and observations that needn’t mean the viewer must take the Tartanry straight, Tartanry will be central to its appeal. “Tartanry” is one of the three main discourses available in depictions of Scotland, a kind of flat-pack of choice when building a narrative world. Tartanry usually covers the Highlands and is historically set or invokes the historical in its kilts, bagpipes and heather, while “Kailyard” often crosses over with it in its portrait of sentimental village life. “Clydesidism” is quite different, yet still often predictable, and McArthur pretty much describes it when saying “the dominant (and equally atavistic) narrative about twentieth-century Lowland Scotland revolves round taciturn masculinity, drink, sport and explosive violence” (p, 212). Forsyth has consistently adopted aspects of all three, depending on the film, but might perhaps be too slippery a director to use when insisting on the naivety of their adoption. In Comfort and Joy (1984), Forsyth turns a Glasgow gangland dispute into a warm tale of mutual misunderstanding as rivalry over ice-cream turf gets resolved by a new recipe.

Brigadoon (Vincente Minelli, 1954) and Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) have been rather less unequivocal in their use of Kailyard and Tartanry and McArthur hasn’t been shy in critiquing them, and never more so and at greater length than in his excellent Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots.² In Cinema, Culture, Scotland they get mentioned more than any other films, and with good reason. While McArthur has also written very well on Hollywood cinema (and in book form in Underworld U.S.A.³), and has essays here on Jean-Pierre Melville, the Western, and Casablanca, the bulk of the book and the thrust behind it is a concern for Scotland and its aesthetic place in the world. As a consequence, and since McArthur isn’t afraid of polemics, Brigadoon and Braveheart are go-to examples for comprehending how Scotland can be perceived as a compendium of cliches in the minds of those who don’t want to think too hard about the potential complexity of a given nation. There is finally more fondness for Minnelli’s film than for Gibson’s, but they are both culpable works. McArthur however can see Brigadoon has a singular aesthetic purpose behind it, with Minnelli using the cliches and conventions for his own ends that fit into a particular aesthetic world. McArthur notes that the expected binary division is evident: Scotland represents nature; America, culture. But he also sees that Minnelli has been consistently interested in “the tension between drab reality and artistic utopianism,” and this “centrality gives the theme’s physical realisation in the mise-en-scène great force and energy” (p. 281). That is the thing with the broadest of conventions; good creative minds can narrow them into originality. The same might be said for great critics; they may use the broadest of brush strokes but also use the most pointillist of techniques, with McArthur always concerned with questions of form and wishing to understand simultaneously the aesthetic choice and the ideological assumption. We notice then when in Brigadoon “there is a justifiably famous cut when the American, having taken a sad farewell of the faery woman in Scotland, is transported back to New York […] the gentle emotions and music of the Scottish scene cuts to a vertiginous overhead view of New York’s skyscrapers accompanied by sudden, blaring, cacophonous, modern brass music” (p. 281). McArthur plays fair to the specifics of the contrast and Minnelli’s interest in the utopian and the realistic.

Brigadoon combines the skilfully crafted and the hopelessly romanticised but there is an unusual courage to the film’s convictions, exemplified by the famous comment made by its producer Arthur Freed: “Freed had been widely quoted as saying that ‘Scotland did not look Scottish enough.’”⁴ This can seem the height of colonial arrogance or the sovereign right of creativity to produce images on an artist’s terms. Minnelli was seen as one of the great directors of colour in Lust for Life (1956), An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958). Why wouldn’t he wish to show Scotland in similar technicolour glory? If he had to film in a studio because the production couldn’t find what they were looking for in Scotland, then so be it. Scottish Romanticism meets with authorial singularity; while some might despair of the stereotypes and the exaggerated beauty, others will see a director feeling the freedom of making a place reflect his vision. When Minnelli shows us the village square with its abundance of food items, it looks more like the south of France than the north of Scotland. While the characters dance and sing we might wonder if Scots might be capable of the same spiritedness if they could usually, and so easily, get the vitamin intake that keeps everyone here so sprightly.

Brigadoon

Yet rather than knocking Minnelli for his corniness, better perhaps to ask why Scotland has allowed itself to become a reservoir for such romanticised images – why Freed could come to Scotland and be disappointed by a reality that didn’t at all match the fantasy the country had presented to the world. That would bring in Scott and Macpherson, and McArthur often does. He speaks for example of the Scottish Development Agency in the 1980s involved in a promotional exercise with a London department store, Selfridges. A large space was given over to a depiction of a Scottish village, and McArthur sees in it “an amalgam of the two hegemonic discourses with which Scotland has been represented: Tartanry and Kailyard” (p. 164). It is a development board peddling regression. Its vision is “one with 250 years of dominant discourses within which Scotland has been represented […] initially in the works of Sir Walter Scott” (idem). Speaking of Macpherson, McArthur pertinently quotes Malcolm Chapman: “Macpherson’s [work] was largely inauthentic with respect to any genuine Gaelic verse tradition, but it was the very voice of authenticity for the developing sentiments of Romanticism in Europe” (p. 406). Brigadoon falls into these clichés too, but at least it was an outsider generating them.

Braveheart was of course an external perspective as well. But while Minnelli hardly resisted the clichés; Gibson’s film doesn’t so much fall prey to them, it preys upon the clichés with greed – and to the detriment of any fidelity to the historical. McArthur notes, “it is Tartanry […] that requires Braveheart’s Scottish characters to wear tartan, though the historical evidence is that they did not, and to be seen in mountainous terrain although theirs was primarily a Lowland struggle” (p. 338). He notes here debased Romanticism, referencing Tom Nairn and other writer’s notion of Romanticism as the cultural mode of nationalism. It is a nationalism segueing into Fascism, and McArthur has noted elsewhere that on a neo-Nazi website “Hitler has been described as ‘a twentieth century Braveheart’”.⁵ But it is also as if Gibson wanted to incorporate whatever myths to hand, including of course that of Jesus. Anyone watching the crucifixion in The Passion of The Christ (2004) may be reminded of similar approaches in Braveheart. In both we have debased myth and aesthetic manipulation for propagandistic or proselytising purposes. This is close to montage as mass hypnosis with, in Braveheart, every cut in the cinematic and literal sense of the term a chance to push an audience’s indignation. When the executioner’s axe falls we have cuts not only to the queen elsewhere who is carrying Wallace’s child, but also to his dead wife, who looks on as she passes revenant-like through the crowds. If this isn’t debased Romanticism as cinematic form then what is? McArthur understandably invokes “torture porn” (p. 339). Tartanry, partly created by that Historical Romanticist Scott, gets absorbed by Gibson into a bigger project that segues into Christian myth and potentially a white nationalist agenda. As McArthur says, referencing the always excellent Neal Ascherson, “Ascherson […] understands better than most nationalism’s universality, virtual inevitability and appalling dangers with the modern world” (p. 343).

Braveheart

What McArthur consistently seeks in artworks presenting Scotland are films, books etc. that critique or escape such images. He admires Murray Grigor and his wife Barbara Grigor’s Scotch Myths, a 1982 TV programme that looked at the various presentations of Scotland in the culture and was made at the same time as McArthur’s own book addressing similar concerns, Scotch Reels. Both were critical of discourses around Scottish cultural stereotypes that kept accreting. Yet he also sees hope in the Timothy Neat film, Play Me Something (1989), co-written by John Berger, who also appears in it, in Grigor’s work generally, in Bill Douglas, early Bill Forsyth and Mike Alexander. This would be slim pickings and McArthur wouldn’t deny it, seeing in Irish cinema during the same period, in films by Joe Comerford, Bob Quinn, Cathal Black and Pat Murphy “a level of engagement with crucial local history and contemporary public issues which was far in advance of that of Scots filmmakers” (p. 326). Around the same time these Irish films were being made, Scottish equivalents weren’t, the Scottish arts scene in Scotland was generally buoyant. In literature James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard, with Irvine Welsh, A.L. Kennedy and Alan Warner coming through. In music, there were numerous Scottish bands from Simple Minds to The Jesus and Mary Chain, Aztec Camera to Orange Juice, Fairground Attraction to Deacon Blue. And there were also The New Glasgow Boys in art: Stephen Campbell, Peter Howson, Ken Currie and Adrian Wiszniewski. When McArthur wrote his “In Praise of a Poor Cinema” essay he would have had plenty of evidence for indigenous culture in the other arts, so why not film? In literature, music and painting we could see movements developing but in cinema that has never quite happened and while Scotland has over the last thirty years offered many films that are far from insubstantial, no substantial wave has become evident. Why that happens to be so needn’t be a blame game, but it remains as pertinent now as when McArthur wrote “In Praise of  a Poor Cinema” more than thirty years ago. McArthur’s superb collection of essays (excellently edited by Jonathan Murray) may help us understand – in his analysis of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious and the ideas that come out of it – why. He has long hoped for a Scottish cinema that would be meagre in resources but rich in imagination, one that eschews large budgets and isn’t preoccupied in capturing large audiences. Instead, Scottish cinema has too often capitulated to the demands of this unconscious need to appeal to stale perceptions over invigorating them with fresh images. It leaves film in a recapitulative state, in an aesthetic torpor needing reinvigoration. Schiach and MacKinnon may have believed McArthur was the dinosaur but he still roams the earth of Scottish cinema like no other figure before or since. MacKinnon might have insisted he needed to get a grip, but nobody’s has been consistently firmer  

Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays, Jonathan Murray, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025).

Endnotes